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156 Posts
Well, I finally plucked up the courage to come out of the closet (or out of the basement, in my case). I've been lurking around this forum for a while, since I was bitten by the bug, actually I think it swallowed me whole!!
My foray into slot car track building started over a year ago, when I realised that the large under-floor space in my new house had to be good for something!! Model trains? Pool table? Table Tennis? SLOT CARS!!! Ah yes, a revisit to my youthful days (some 40 years ago!) when I would hurl around Hornsby slot car track after school (sometimes even without a car!).
So I busily started excavating and terracing what was a very sloping site. Built some concrete retaining walls to hold in the dirt & house supports, and started building the track in late Feb 07.
Well, the track was up and running by October, though not quite complete (a permanent state, I'm sure). It's a 3 lane routed MDF track, average lane length 41 meters, and is a complete BLAST to drive! (I wonder if scaleys are supposed to go that fast?!). It is known as Pretzel Logic Raceway (for obvious reasons once you see it!)
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Work has slowed down quite a bit since the power was connected to the track (funny that!), but I have finished all the sidewalls and managed to do a bit of landscaping since October last year.
I thought I would try and trace the history of its construction with some pics I took during the process. Like Dickens' famous works (!), this expose will take the form of a serial over the next little while as time allows. So here you go, please make whatever comments and ask any questions you wish!
In the beginning…
Here's the underneath of my house after finishing the 'landforming':
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as you can see, I made several terraces to make the natural slope more useful (drops over 3 metres from one side of the house to the other). Moved about 10 tons of dirt out and used 60 bags of readymix!
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I might add that almost all of the skills required to build the Pretzel had never been owned by me before, especially concreting! It was/is a steep (and rewarding) learning curve.
Once this stage was finished, it was time to seriously start planning the track.
Essential design considerations
you may have heard these before)
1. Longest possible straight (achieved that: 12 meters!)
2. able to run 1/32 and 1/24th scale (my new son-in-law coincidentally had a stable of womps, flexi & wing cars that he raced in his 'youth' - unused for many years, but I was keen to run them!). So the design needed to be flowing enough to allow for some seriously fast cars, yet interesting enough for slower 1/32 scale racing
3. I needed to be able to walk under the track in the far corner for access to the back part of the space (where the lawnmower is in the above pic)
4. I wanted to make the track as big as possible (don't we all?), which meant the furthest corner would be many meters from the driver's position. I wanted to make this corner uncrashable to minimise the disruption when self-marshalling. How far can you bend a piece of MDF into a banked corner before it breaks? (didn't find out, but was able to bank an amazing corner!).
5. I wanted to use the house support posts as the superstructure for the track - I thought this would help to make them 'invisible', and I thought there was a nice efficiency to this notion.
So, after much doodling on paper, I realised I needed to get a better realisation of the idea (all those posts made working in 2 dimensions difficult, and the extreme elevations were hard to visualise, so I made up a 1/10th scale model of my first draft of the plan (1/10th scale of 1/32nd scale - does that make it 1/320th scale?!!). I recently found it under a pile of MDF dust:
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This showed me the furthest corner mentioned in 3 & 4 above was far too small a radius, but that the elevations might work. I then started mucking about with UR30, and came up with this:
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next instalment: The wood arrives!
Cheers!
Count
My foray into slot car track building started over a year ago, when I realised that the large under-floor space in my new house had to be good for something!! Model trains? Pool table? Table Tennis? SLOT CARS!!! Ah yes, a revisit to my youthful days (some 40 years ago!) when I would hurl around Hornsby slot car track after school (sometimes even without a car!).
So I busily started excavating and terracing what was a very sloping site. Built some concrete retaining walls to hold in the dirt & house supports, and started building the track in late Feb 07.
Well, the track was up and running by October, though not quite complete (a permanent state, I'm sure). It's a 3 lane routed MDF track, average lane length 41 meters, and is a complete BLAST to drive! (I wonder if scaleys are supposed to go that fast?!). It is known as Pretzel Logic Raceway (for obvious reasons once you see it!)
Work has slowed down quite a bit since the power was connected to the track (funny that!), but I have finished all the sidewalls and managed to do a bit of landscaping since October last year.
I thought I would try and trace the history of its construction with some pics I took during the process. Like Dickens' famous works (!), this expose will take the form of a serial over the next little while as time allows. So here you go, please make whatever comments and ask any questions you wish!
In the beginning…
Here's the underneath of my house after finishing the 'landforming':
as you can see, I made several terraces to make the natural slope more useful (drops over 3 metres from one side of the house to the other). Moved about 10 tons of dirt out and used 60 bags of readymix!
I might add that almost all of the skills required to build the Pretzel had never been owned by me before, especially concreting! It was/is a steep (and rewarding) learning curve.
Once this stage was finished, it was time to seriously start planning the track.
Essential design considerations
you may have heard these before)1. Longest possible straight (achieved that: 12 meters!)
2. able to run 1/32 and 1/24th scale (my new son-in-law coincidentally had a stable of womps, flexi & wing cars that he raced in his 'youth' - unused for many years, but I was keen to run them!). So the design needed to be flowing enough to allow for some seriously fast cars, yet interesting enough for slower 1/32 scale racing
3. I needed to be able to walk under the track in the far corner for access to the back part of the space (where the lawnmower is in the above pic)
4. I wanted to make the track as big as possible (don't we all?), which meant the furthest corner would be many meters from the driver's position. I wanted to make this corner uncrashable to minimise the disruption when self-marshalling. How far can you bend a piece of MDF into a banked corner before it breaks? (didn't find out, but was able to bank an amazing corner!).
5. I wanted to use the house support posts as the superstructure for the track - I thought this would help to make them 'invisible', and I thought there was a nice efficiency to this notion.
So, after much doodling on paper, I realised I needed to get a better realisation of the idea (all those posts made working in 2 dimensions difficult, and the extreme elevations were hard to visualise, so I made up a 1/10th scale model of my first draft of the plan (1/10th scale of 1/32nd scale - does that make it 1/320th scale?!!). I recently found it under a pile of MDF dust:
This showed me the furthest corner mentioned in 3 & 4 above was far too small a radius, but that the elevations might work. I then started mucking about with UR30, and came up with this:
next instalment: The wood arrives!
Cheers!
Count
